Jean François Revel remains best know for
his seminal 1970 book, Neither Marx Nor Jesus. In that book, Revel argued
against the equivalence of the Soviet Union and the United States, which
he saw as a new model of anti-authoritarian society the whole world would
want to emulate.

In his new book, The Anti-American Obsession, to
be published in English by Encounter Books in Fall 2003, Revel examines
the knee-jerk, fact-resistant anti-Americanism that is Prevalent among
both left and right in France today. The following excerpt was translated
from the French for NPQ by Bill Weber.

Paris—Paradoxically the United States
is sometimes more hated and disapproved of, even by its allies, since
the end of the Cold War than it was during this period by open as well
as covert partisans of communism.

Long before the US, there have been empires and powers
of international scope. However, there had never been one with planetary
preponderance. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National
Security Advisor, underscores this fact in his book The Grand Chessboard.
In order to deserve the title of world superpower, a country must be ranked
first in four fields: economy, technology, military and culture. At the
present time, the US is the only country—and the first in history—that
fulfills all four conditions not merely on a continental level but on
a planetary one. Since the revival of 1983 and until the beginning of
the recession in 2001 the American economy has clearly been ahead, with
its combination of growth, full employment and the absence of inflation.
In technology it enjoys a quasi-monopoly with the spectacular development
that it has been able to foster in the field of state-of-the-art communication
tools. Militarily, it is the only power capable of intervening at any
time in any part of the globe.

Its cultural superiority, however, is more debatable.
The question is whether you define the term culture in its narrow or large
meaning. In terms of the former definition—the highest creative
manifestations of culture in literature, painting, music or architecture—the
American civilization is certainly brilliant but it is not the only one
nor is it always the best. At this prestigious level its radiance cannot
be compared to that of the civilizations of Ancient Greece, Rome or China.
One could even say that the American artistic and literary culture has
a tendency toward “provincialization.” Because of the dominating
position of the English language fewer and fewer of even cultured Americans
read works in foreign languages. Even when American academics or critics
open up to a foreign school of thought, they do so at times out of fashionable
conformism rather than based on original judgment.

Brzezinski is correct, however, when it comes to culture
in its largest sense, that of mass culture. The American press and media
transcend the whole world. Youth everywhere are attracted by the American
lifestyle, such as clothing, pop music, food and entertainment. American
movies and TV series attract millions of viewers on all continents, so
much so that some countries, including France, are attempting to engage
in protectionism making the case of a “cultural exception.”
The English language has become the de facto language of the Internet
and has been for long the main language of scientific communication. Many
members of the intellectual elite in politics, technology and science
in the most diverse nations are graduates from American universities.

An even more decisive factor, very much to the chagrin
of past and present socialists, was the global victory of the model of
freedom after the fall of communism. Equally, the American federalist
democracy is being emulated elsewhere, not the least by the European Union.
Its organizational principles have inspired numerous alliances, including
NATO and the UN.

This is by no means an attempt to negate the faults,
hypocrisies and deviations of the American system. The fact remains, though,
that neither Asia nor Africa or Latin America can teach the US many lessons
in democracy. Europe for its part has been the inventor of the great criminal
ideologies of the last century. In fact, these were the reasons why the
US had to intervene twice on our continent, during the two world wars.
It is this failure of Europe that is at the origin of America’s
present status as the only superpower.

The American preponderance has certainly grown out of
its own qualities but also out of the mistakes made by others, in particular
by Europe. Even recently France has accused the US of wanting to deprive
it of its influence in Africa. France, however, bears a heavy responsibility
for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and in the ensuing collapse of Zaire.
France discredited itself, thereby creating a void that was quickly filled
by an increasing presence of the US. The European Union has hardly developed
into a unique diplomatic and military decision making center. It can rather
be characterized as a choir whose individual singers all act like soloists.
How could it be a counterweight to the efficiency of American foreign
policy if it must achieve unanimity among all of its 15 members before
even sketching any minor action? What will happen after it has grown to
include 27 members that are even more diverse than its present members?

The American superpower is only partly the result of
the will and creativity of the Americans. It is also due to an accumulation
of errors and mistakes by the rest of the world, such as the failure of
communism, the shipwreck of Africa, the divisions within Europe and the
delays in developing democracy in Latin America and Asia.

Finding the term superpower all too weak and banal,
Hubert Védrine, the French minister of foreign affairs in the “pluralistic
leftist” government, replaced it in 1998 by the neologism “hyperpower.”
He found it to be stronger and more commensurate with the hegemony of
the US in the present world. This does not stand to reason as the Greek
prefix “hyper” has exactly the same meaning as the Latin prefix
“super.” However, according to Mr. Védrine, it defines
the position of a country that is dominant or predominant in all categories,
including “attitudes, concepts, language and lifestyle.” He
comments that the American media consider the prefix “hyper”
to be aggressive without being negative. Simply put, he writes that “we
cannot accept a world that is politically unipolar and culturally uniform,
just as we cannot accept the unilateralism of one sole hyperpower.”
This is a contradictory argument. In fact, if the term hyperpower lacks
a negative content, why then is the reality that it describes unacceptable?
Whether it is or not is irrelevant. The fact is that it exists. What is
lacking in the European thinking (as well as in many others) is the search
for the reasons for its existence. Once we have successfully identified
and correctly interpreted these reasons, and only then, can we hope to
find the means to counterbalance the American preponderance.

Europeans in particular should explore their own responsibilities
that have led to this preponderance.

If I am not mistaken the Europeans were responsible
for turning the 20th century into the politically and morally darkest
in human history. They provoked the two cataclysms of heretofore-unknown
proportions, the two World Wars. They invented and put into practice the
two most criminal regimes that were ever inflicted upon humanity. We Europeans
have reached these summits of evil and imbecility in less than thirty
years! When I say that these scourges cannot be compared to any other
in the past I am referring, of course, to man-made catastrophes alone
and not to any natural disasters or epidemics. If we add to the fall of
Europe caused by the two world wars and the two totalitarianisms the quagmire
caused in the Third World by the effects of colonialization, we again
must look to Europe to find, at least in part, those responsible for the
impasses and convulsions of underdevelopment. It was Europe or more precisely
England, Belgium, Spain, France, Holland, and later and to a lesser degree
Germany and Italy who conquered and wanted to appropriate the other continents.
The arguments of the extermination of the native Indians and the slavery
of the blacks in the US do not hold water. Who were the occupants of what
was to become the US, if not the white colonizers from Europe? And from
whom did these European colonizers purchase their slaves, if not from
European slave traders?

The situation created by the two world wars which were,
in actual fact, European suicide attempts, as well as the Europeans’
propensity to create totalitarian regimes, themselves intrinsically suicidal,
has been exacerbated since 1990 by the obligation to clean up the ruins
left by communism after its demise. Here again, Europe did not really
have any solutions. Most of its political, media and cultural leaders
never fully understood communism. Let us remember how even the political
right lauded Mao during the worst moments of his destructive fanaticism.
Thus, they were ill equipped to comprehend and guide the exit from communism.
Before the backdrop of this additional and entirely new problem, the present
American “hyperpower” is merely the direct consequence of
the old and present European impotence. It fills a gap created not by
the insufficiency of our forces but of our way of thinking and our will
to act.

Just think of the amazement of a citizen in the state
of Montana or Tennessee upon learning about the American intervention
in the former Yugoslavia. He would be right to ask why the US is interested
in diving into the bloody mud pits of the Balkans, a multi-secular chef
d’oeuvre of unmatched European ingenuity. Europe itself has brought
about this murderous chaos. Yet it is incapable of getting it in order
by itself. In order to bring the massacres in the Balkans to a halt or
at least to diminish them, the US takes charge of the operation, successively
in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. The Europeans, scared to death, then
express their gratitude by treating them as imperialists and subsequently
by labeling them as isolationists as soon as they talk about withdrawing
their troops from the region.

As all societies, even the most democratic ones, the
American society has many faults and deserves criticism as well. However,
in order to express more than just the phobias of its detractors, these
criticisms must be justified and the faults must be real ones. The almost
ritual pitiful sneers whose object the US has become in the European media
are mostly based on such a deep absence of information that they must
appear intentional. And yet, during the period of emergence of the US
as the sole superpower, American and European authors alike have published
dozens of serious books and hundreds of articles. These contrast with
many wannabe authors and journalism based on mere obsession. They provide
the open-minded reader with accurate, balanced and nuanced information
about the internal and external functioning of the American society, its
successes and failures, its good deeds and bad deeds, and its lucid as
well as its blind reasoning. Laziness alone cannot explain why the overwhelming
majority of European opinion leaders simply ignore this relevant documentation.
Most often it is intentional and can be explained only by the fixed ideas
of those who confine themselves to them. Although one may not be able
to draw final conclusions on many most serious points from these scrupulous
inventories, at least they are not dictated by incompetence.

THE SOCIAL CRITIQUE | The often intentional refusal
to inform concerns first and foremost the social questions in the US,
such as the so-called absence of protection and solidarity as well as
the unemployment rate and the famous “poverty threshold.”
The latter expression is used all over by people who obviously do not
know its technical meaning. As if this indicator had the same quantifiable
content in Canada and in Zimbabwe. According to our commentators the fact
that the US unemployment rate had dropped below 5 percent since 1984 whereas
our own had skyrocketed to around 12 percent, meant nothing good for the
US, given that these jobs were mostly “menial jobs.” Ah! Here
we have the myth of the menial jobs. How it has comforted us! During the
economic slowdown of the first half of 2001 the American unemployment
rate rose from 4.4 percent of the working population to 5.5 percent. On
7 May 2001 the French economic daily La Tribune immediately printed a
full first page headline “Full Employment Ends in the United States.”
This is but one example.

Yet, at precisely the same time the French government
applauded itself frenetically for having reduced our own unemployment
rate to 8.7 percent, i.e. almost twice the American rate (without taking
into account the tens of thousands of actual unemployed that France artificially
excludes from its statistics). By September 2001 the unemployment rate
in France already exceeded 9 percent. On 15 February 2001 Le Monde published
an article entitled “The End of the American Economic Dream.”
In other words, a practically uninterrupted growth of 17 years (1983–2000),
an unprecedented technological revolution since the 19th century, the
creation of tens of millions of new jobs, an unemployment rate of only
4 percent as well as an enormous and unexpected demographic increase from
248 million to 281 million between 1990 and 2000—all this was but
a “dream.” What a pity that France did not realize this dream!
Granted, the author of the article readily straddles the hobbyhorse of
the “menial jobs” and deplores that France Americanized itself
to the point of “copying the sad example of the working poor.”
As if this were the only example given by the American economy from which
no lesson can be learned. Undoubtedly, France was better off remaining
faithful to its own model of the not working poor.

We will come back to the regrettable catalog put together
by the public accusers about the American civilization. I have limited
my observations in this brief outline to pointing out the eminently contradictory
character of their accusations. If, according to the picture that these
people paint, this civilization were the result of a mere accumulation
of economic, political, social and cultural calamities, why then is the
rest of the world so clearly concerned about its wealth, its dominance
in science and technology and the omnipresence of its cultural models?
This poor America should be pitied rather than envied and generate less
animosity than commiseration. What a riddle is this success of the American
people, based entirely on its abysmal worthlessness rather than on its
own merits!

Besides the social questions, it is the functioning
of the American institutions that is either poorly understood or that
one does not want to understand. Let me give but one example: the joyous
and disdainful reactions around the world and in Europe in particular
to the long uncertainty after the American presidential elections of November
2000.

ELECTORAL GLEE | Many years ago I was watching a comedy
at the vaudeville theater El Salón México (immortalized
by Aaron Copeland’s orchestral composition with the same title).
It was a discussion between a Mexican peón (a man of the street)
and an American tourist. The tourist touted the achievements of his country
by saying, “At home in the US we know the name of our new president
three minutes after the closure of the polls.” The peón answered,
“But sir, here we know his name six months before the elections.”
At that time, and for a long time after that, the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI) amassed all powers in Mexico and fabricated the election results.
In actual fact, each president designated his successor.

How times have changed! For the first time in 2000 the
candidate of a Mexican opposition party conquered the presidency thanks
to honest elections whose result was not known beforehand. In the US,
on the other hand, it took weeks before we knew who the new president
would be. Thus, democracy has undeniably made progress in Mexico. Does
this mean that it has taken a step backward in the US? This is the interpretation
that many foreign commentators felt entitled to give of the long uncertainty
that followed the elections of 7 November 2000.

This, however, is a gross misunderstanding. Let us remember
first and foremost that a very close election result that even necessitated
a recount of the votes is the sign of democracy rather than the contrary.
Dictatorships, although disguised as presidencies, usually post margins
of colossal proportions. Also, the system of electors, that some have
qualified as anti-democratic, certainly is nothing of the sort. It is
a system that converts the proportional vote to a majority one, by eliminating
the small candidates and a “bonus” to the winning candidate,
state by state.

There are several methods to force voters to vote in
a useful way. France has the two-round method. Only the two candidates
who receive the most votes in the first round are allowed to participate
in the second round. The British method, consisting of a majority vote
in one round only, is even more brutal if there are numerous candidates
for the same seat. One candidate can win the seat with only one-quarter
or one-third of the votes as long as he comes out ahead of the others.

By comparison, the American system of the Electoral
College seems clearly fairer. The number of electors is proportional to
the population of each state. The candidate who exceeds 50 percent of
the popular vote in any given state receives the votes of all electors,
just as in France where the winning candidate receives the total presidential
power in the second round, even if 49.9 percent of voters voted against
him. No one questions his legitimacy. Why then has the American system
of electors been labeled “elitist”? By tradition, if not by
the Constitution, the electors have a mandatory mandate in thirty of the
50 states. In the 19 other states as well as in the District of Columbia
they could theoretically not follow the popular vote and choose the minority
candidate. This, however, has never happened since the beginning of the
19th century.

It is a clear sign of ill will when some leaders or
intellectuals from countries that are little or not at all democratic
refer to the US as a “banana republic.” When these comments
emanate from Moammar Kada? or Robert Mugabe who have successfully dug
the grave of any trace of democracy in their countries, they are downright
comical. Coming from the Russians where the restoration of universal suffrage
was certainly encouraging if not exempt from some dark sides, they are
hypocritical. How can one resist a smile when reading novelist Salman
Rushdie write, “India is better than the US thanks to its electoral
system based on direct universal suffrage”? Rushdie seems to be
the only person to ignore that India breaks all records of electoral fraud.
We turn a blind eye to this situation because we are all too happy that
India remains a democracy after all.

What our European press has condescendingly called the
American “feuilleton” was, in actual fact, a process that
was entirely in conformity with the Constitution. The American Constitution
has foreseen the case of a dead heat, in which case the House of Representatives
elects the future president, if necessary.

Moreover, in Europe and elsewhere people have commented
with disdain on the recourse to the court system to determine the right
of candidates to ask for a recount of votes in Florida. Some felt that
this chicanery was quite deplorable when it comes to filling the most
visible office in the world.

My main objection would be that arbitration by judges
is in any event preferable to that from the street. However, during this
whole critical period, and in spite of the intensity of the polemics and
a degree of confusion that could have pushed many other countries into
a coup d’etat, civil war or even some massacres, the US witnessed
no violence and not even the shadow of a fight.

Also, the ironic remarks about the American judges indicate
a misunderstanding of the position of the judiciary in the US as well
as of its action on the political power. As early as 1835 Tocqueville
wrote (De la démocratie en Amérique, Part one, Chapter VI):
“What is most difficult for foreigners to understand in the United
States is the organization of the judiciary. There is hardly any political
event in which a judge’s authority is not called upon.”

Because political questions are thus transformed into
judicial matters, foreigners even today arrive at the misconception that
judges usurp political power. Tocqueville clearly demonstrated why this
is incorrect. In actual fact, the judiciary in the US always remains within
the classical limits of its intrinsic function, and this for three reasons:
It always and exclusively serves as an arbitrator. It emits judgments
only on specific cases and not on general principles. It shall only act
when called upon and never out of its own initiative.

It is therefore erroneous to speak of a “government
of judges.” Judges can replace neither the executive nor the legislative
power. Granted, in the spirit of American institutions the law supersedes
the state. However, the judiciary shall only have a political impact through
its interpretation of the law, and only when this interpretation is solicited.

Lastly, the complexity of the voting cards has been
criticized not without merit. Some voters found them difficult to decipher
and their reading by electronic machines was (supposedly) not foolproof.
Also, American citizens vote the same day not only for their president
but also elect representatives, senators, state governors, mayors, sheriffs,
as well as judges. These procedures can certainly be made simpler and
safer. But these are purely technical matters and not a threat to democracy.

EUROPE’S DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT | Democracy in the
European Union operates in fact less well than in the “Union of
States of America.” The respective weight of each European country
in the European Parliament and the EU Commission is only remotely commensurate
with real demographic power. In the Europe of 15, the 10 least populated
countries together have a population that is equivalent to that of Germany.
In the Council of Ministers, however, they have 39 votes versus only 10
for Germany. In the European Parliament Germany is entitled to one member
for each 1,200,000 inhabitants whereas Luxembourg gets one for each 67,000
inhabitants. The Nice Summit in December, 2000, only touched the surface
of a true correction of this imbalance. The Europeans have thus found
a less fair compromise than the Americans when it comes to giving representation
and minimal powers to the smallest states while respecting a certain proportionality
of representation between demographics and the political power of the
largest states.

Lastly, the falsified descriptions of the social relations
and the standard of living in the US have the purpose, besides satisfying
the anti-American passion, of denigrating the free economy. Furthermore,
the misconception or the caricature of the American institutions spread
the idea that the US is not really a democracy, and, by extrapolation,
that free democracies are democratic in name only.

American Monster? | It is in the field of international
relations that the “hyperpower” is badmouthed with a vitriol
that is reserved for true monsters. Let me state once again that American
foreign policy certainly deserves criticism in many respects. The American
press itself certainly does not hold back its criticism. Such criticism,
even though it may not be entirely convincing, is legitimate and useful,
provided that it is based on a minimum of rational argumentation. However,
when Vladimir Putin affirms with an admirable assurance that the “crimes”
of NATO—in his mind those committed by the US in Kosovo in 1999—as
well as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal
Court in 2001 have led to the “destabilization” of Yugoslavia
(which “destabilized” itself since 1991), we are faced not
with a rational criticism but with a deliberate lie and a hallucination
with an inherent contradiction. Is this not a reversal of cause and effect?
Its only purpose is psychological: to flatter whatever Slavic amour-propre.
Its political usefulness both for the Russians and the Serbs is nil. If
Putin hopes to restore Russia to its status of a “Great Power”
by using fables of this scope, he will ?nd out rather quickly that one
cannot act efficiently on the basis of erroneous analyses. If Russia is
not a superpower at the beginning of the 21st century, it is because it
embarked upon the path of the absurd experiment of communism in 1917.
It transformed Russian society into one that is much farther behind than
it was before this experience. Once Russia adapts to this reality it will
be able to overcome this retardation, but not by always criticizing the
US.

The European Union and by extension the whole “international
community” rushed fervently to this mixture of self-comforting auto-disinformation
and narcissistic inconsequence when it came to greet President George
W. Bush’s first foreign policy initiatives during his first weeks
in office. One example may suffice: the international reactions to Bush’s
refusal to confirm his predecessor’s largely platonic commitments
with respect to the environment.

GREEN Marxists | It is well known that in 1997 under
the auspices of the United Nations, delegates from 168 countries, assembled
in Kyoto, signed a protocol to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.
Shortly after taking office in January, 2001, Bush withdrew the US adherence
to the Kyoto protocol. Immediately indignation and even insults abounded,
especially from Europe. Bush, it was said, cynically sacrificed our planet’s
future to capitalist profit and in particular to the oil companies whose
notorious puppet he is, as we were told. Unfortunately, the authors of
this in-depth analysis neglected some facts that they could have easily
researched. First and foremost, in 1997 under Clinton’s presidency,
the American Senate had already voted against the Kyoto protocol by 95
votes to 0. Rightly or wrongly, this is another problem. The fact remains,
however, that Bush was not responsible. Later, just before turning over
his powers to his successor, Bill Clinton had signed an executive order
re-establishing the American support for the famous protocol.

Good manners in a democracy dictate that executive orders
issued by an outgoing president at the end of his mandate never deal with
questions of high importance for the political future of the country.
In this instance Clinton’s obvious intention was to pull a fast
one on Bush and to leave him with a crown of thorns. Had he accepted the
commitment, the new president would have had to confront the enormous
difficulty of reducing gas emissions by 5.2 percent without painful and
precipitous cuts in industrial production and energy consumption of individuals,
which would have been an impossible challenge. A rejection, on the other
hand, would unleash vociferous personal criticism from the whole world.
This was what occurred. These criticisms were all the more hypocritical
as their most vociferous authors who pilloried the US in front of all
humanity in the name of ecological morals were most careful not to apply
the same moral standards to themselves. In fact, by the middle of 2001,
four years after the Kyoto conference, not a single one of the 167 other
signatories and most prominently none of the European countries had ratified
the protocol.

I have temporarily left aside the question whether the
Kyoto protocol is realistic. Suffice it to say that some highly polluting
countries, such as Brazil, China and India, demand that the US apply restrictions
that they themselves do not feel obliged to respect. In a report published
on 29 May 2001 the European Environment Agency observed a worsening of
pollution in Europe, due mainly to a “constant increase of transportation,
especially those forms of transportation that are the least respectful
of the environment (road and air traffic).” The agency also noted
an increase in pollution due to home heating and of water pollution due
to nitrates. Those who preach are definitely not showing a good example.

One could be tempted to take an additional step and
to think that there is an anti-American psychopathology attempting to
transform the US into the scapegoat for all sins committed by the rest
of the world. The ecologists would refute that and observe that the US,
with its approximately 5 percent of the world’s population, produces
25 percent of the planet’s industrial pollution. This may be true,
though it should be added that it also produces 25 percent of the goods
and services of this same planet. It must also be said that up to the
middle of 2001 the 167 other signatories of the Kyoto Protocol had done
absolutely nothing, collectively and individually, to begin to reduce
their 75 percent of the pollution. We are in the middle of total incoherence.
It was more important to excommunicate than to un-pollute.

Whatever criticism the American environmental policy
deserves or does not deserve, one must realize that the core of the debate
needs to be found elsewhere. The objective of the Western ecologists is
to make the US, that is to say capitalism, the supreme and even the sole
culprit of the planet’s pollution. Our ecologists are anything but
ecologists. They are leftists. They are interested in the environment
that they pretend to defend only as a means to attack free society. During
the ’70s and ’80s they never denounced the pollution in the
communist countries that was a thousand times more atrocious than in the
West. It was not a capitalist pollution. They were silent when Chernobyl
happened and they are silent now about the decrepit nuclear power plants
that still exist all over the former Communist territories. They also
remain silent about the hundreds of ex-Soviet submarines, armed to the
teeth with nuclear weapons, that the Russians sank as they were in the
Barents Sea. To demand that humanity be freed of this mortal peril that
will endanger it for thousands of years would be useless from their socialist
point of view. Indeed, this tiring enterprise would not in any way strengthen
their crusade against the scourge of globalization that they consider
to be a much more formidable danger. In the past, especially in the ’70s
and especially in the US, there was a sincere environmentalism. But it
has long been since recovered and transformed by an environmentalism full
of lies that has become the mask of old Marxist theories under a shade
of green. This ideological environmentalism sees nature threatened only
in those nations that practice economic freedom and above all in the richest
of them all.

EMISSION OMISSION | If the Green parties honestly aimed
at practical results, they would begin efforts in their own countries
to adopt the draconian 5.2 percent reduction in energy consumption that
was agreed in Kyoto. They, and especially those who are part of the ruling
governments, have the task to push through a 50 percent reduction of the
speed limit on freeways, a reduction of home heating by one-third, without
forgetting the inevitable increases in the electricity bills once consumption
exceeds certain thresholds. To clearly recommend such a drastic program,
let alone to apply it in the short term, would expose the Greens to blatant
electoral losses. This is why they condemn the US to the flames of hell
instead of acting on those programs.

France had Green ministers during the five years of
Jospin’s government from 1997 and 2002. Yet, during this long period
it adopted no environmental protection measures that would have required
courage such as the prohibition of nitrate which would have allowed a
return to purer water but would have created a farmers’ revolt,
or the ecological tax that would have led to an exodus of the votes of
many taxpayers who are already burglarized by the government. The French
authorities do not even attempt to enforce the speed limits, although
these are not very severe in their present definitions. How could they
even try to reduce them further? Has the US prevented the French government
from beginning to apply the Kyoto process that stipulates a reduction
in energy consumption by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012?
Granted, the 15 members of the European Union finally ratified the Kyoto
protocol of 1997 on 31 May 2002. We will have to wait and see whether
this ratification will be followed by implementation within the deadlines.

WRONG BUT RICH | Thus the US is always wrong, while
its financial and military intervention is universally sought. The African
leaders, for example, at the meeting of the Organization for African Unity
in Lusaka/Zambia in June 2001, called for a “Marshall Plan for Africa.”
Marshall Plan obviously recalls a historic precedent of American origin,
an initiative that pulled Europe from the ruins of World War II. Yet,
almost all of these African leaders who “govern” (if that
term can be used in this instance) Africa usually profess a frenetic anti-Americanism.
They accuse the US of being the culprits of Africa’s poverty as
well as of the AIDS epidemic. In this instance, anti-Americanism becomes
a means for eluding responsibility. In fact, the international aid given
to Africa since independence amounts to the equivalent of four to five
Marshall Plans. However, these funds have been wasted or sunk into incessant
wars and annihilated by stupid agrarian reforms that were copied on the
Soviet or Chinese models of collectivist oppression. It is comforting,
however, to shoulder the US with the responsibility for one’s own
mistakes, while simultaneously asking for help.

Europe itself is not exempt from this intellectual fiction.
At the time when it benefited from the Marshall Plan, the leftist parties
were hostile to it as they felt that it would be a means for the US to
place Western Europe under its influence. It was considered a neo-colonialist
and imperialistic maneuver. This was a simple application of the Marxist
dogma. The socialist parties and the Christian Democrats on the center
right, which were in power in most European countries that were allies
of the US, defended their sentiment of gratitude but felt that the US,
through its generosity, was also acting in its own interests. As if the
US, besides everything else, had to go against its own interests! Furthermore,
in conformity with the usual contradictions within the anti-American reasoning,
we accused and still accuse the US of being against a strong Europe. In
other words, the Americans make Europe stronger to make it weaker! The
European way of thinking with respect to the US is decidedly a model of
incoherence.

Unilateralism | The whole world must realize that the
US is, for the time being at least, the only power capable of saving Mexico
from economic and financial bankruptcy (in 1995), to dissuade Communist
China from attacking Taiwan militarily, to attempt a mediation between
India and Pakistan over Kashmir, to put efficient pressure on the Serbian
government to send Slobodan Milosevic to the International Criminal Court
in The Hague, and to attempt with any chance of success the reunification
of the two Koreas under one democratic government. The European Union
tried to meddle with this last problem by sending a delegation led by
the Swedish prime minister to Pyongyang in May of 2001. However, this
delegation found nothing better to do than to prostrate itself at the
feet of Kim Jong Il, the criminal leader of one of the last totalitarian
prisons on this planet. The “European solution,” if it were
clearly understood, would be to align South Korea with the North Korean
regime, instead of the reverse. If the Europeans think that they can put
an end to the American “unilateralism” by ideas of this kind,
the diplomatic dominance of the US will last for a long time to come.

This unilateralism is in actual fact the mechanical
result of the failure of the other powers. More often than not, this failure
is more intellectual than material. It is based more on errors of analysis
(as in the case of Korea) than on insufficient economic, political or
strategic means. Nothing forced the Europeans, for instance, to let the
US alone help the Afghani resistance forces in their fight against Soviet
invaders in the ’80s. It was certainly not for lack of resources
that Europe abstained from helping the Afghanis. It was because of obsequiousness
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and following a regrettably erroneous
analysis, paired with the illusion or the excuse of “maintaining
détente,” which was dead anyway, if it ever existed anywhere
outside Western optimism.

We find the same confusion with respect to the economic
realities. On the one hand, foreigners accuse the Americans of wanting
“to impose their economic and social model on others.” On
the other hand, other countries suffer more or less swiftly each time
there is an economic slowdown in the US. All then wait eagerly for the
American “revival,” hoping that their own will follow soon.
What leaves us perplexed is how such a bad economy whose recipes nobody
supposedly wants to copy is powerful enough to act as a locomotive or
brake for so many other countries.

Under these conditions and given these many illogical
theses, it is not incomprehensible that the US considers itself as carrying
a universal mission of sorts. This conviction frequently prompts its spokespersons
to make irritating declarations that border on megalomania, the odious
or the comical. These unfortunate declarations lead me to three observations.

First, these declarations, although outrageous at times,
have indisputable factual bases that can be experimentally verified.

Second, one can just as easily find thousands of equally
grotesque declarations emanating from the French, celebrating over the
centuries the “universal radiation” of France, the “motherland
of human rights,” with the mission to spread liberté, égalité,
fraternité to the whole world. The Soviet Union also thought that
it had the mission to transform the universe through revolution. Muslims
want even non-Muslims to respect the sharia.

Thirdly, the principle of the raison d’etat, which
is indifferent to morals and the interests of others, has gone bankrupt
in international politics since the war of 1914–1918. It has been
replaced by the principle of collective security that was brought to Europe
by Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and strongly reinforced by Franklin Roosevelt
and Harry Truman in 1945. The international policy inspired by this principle
is American and has operated under American leadership since 1945. One
can hardly imagine another principle that could lead us to a less unacceptable
world. For this international policy based on collective security (including,
obviously, the fight against terrorism) not to give rise to an American
“hyperpower,” many other countries must be intelligent enough
to associate themselves with its elaboration and implementation, rather
than to simply denigrate its promoters.